There was an envelope on the floor near the jacket. He remembered Saskia linking her arm in his. The envelope was addressed to ‘You’. He opened it and withdrew a single sheet of paper.
Down in Marseilles there’s a nice bar run by a man called Dupont. It is famous for its cat, which turned up one day and never left. The cat thinks she’s a loner but, really, she likes company. Now can you remember all that?
David smiled and watched the text fade until the paper was blank.
---
In 1947 a Santiago-bound plane crashes into the Andes minutes after confirming its landing time.
In 2003 a passenger plane nosedives into the Bavarian National Forest during a routine flight.
Although separated by more than 50 years, these tragedies are linked by seven letters:
S, T, E, N, D, E, C.
It is the night of September 5th, 1907, and the Moscow train is approaching St Petersburg. Traveling first class appears to be a young Russian princess and her fiancé. They are impostors. In the luggage carriage are the spoils of the Yerevan Square Expropriation, the greatest bank heist in history. The money is intended for Finland, and the hands of a man known to the Tsarist authorities as The Mountain Eagle—Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.
Author’s Note
Dear reader,
Thanks for finishing my book. I really appreciate it. Honestly, I lose count of the books I’ve given up on halfway through. I’ve tried to make Déjà Vu the kind of book that you can’t put down. To do this, I’ve taken Elmore Leonard’s advice and carefully removed all the rubbish bits, printed them out, and sent them to Dan Brown as suggestions.
IF ‘fan of Dan Brown’ = TRUE then
Awkward pause.
ELSE
Suck air through teeth and looked pained. The Da Vinci Code, eh? Blimey.
END IF
So, back to this important Author’s Note. You know when a street juggler performs the last, amazing trick, and then whips out a moth-eaten beret and invites the audience to help him eat?
That.
By all means, close this book, think no more about it, and good luck to you.
But cast your mind back to my amazing trick with the chicken, unicycle, and the unctuous child from the front row! If you’d like to help me out, and you liked Déjà Vu, please let people know about it. If you thought the book was total flapdoodle, please tell no-one, and it will remain our dirty secret. You see, I’m an independent writer and I pay for my own editing, proof-reading, and marketing. And the coffee! You wouldn’t believe how much the cost of coffee mounts up over the course of a book. Even the cheap stuff I get from Lidl. Seriously. It’s criminal. And I usually let it go cold before I drink it. So, feel free to tweet about Déjà Vu, write me a review on the Kindle store (these are particularly helpful), or otherwise spread the word.
If you look at my Amazon page (US or UK), you’ll see that there is another Saskia Brandt book called Flashback. (The stonkingly huge advert just before this Author’s Note would be another clue.) Furthermore, I’m nose-to-the-grindstone on the third book: The Amber Rooms. Should be out by early 2013. It’s taken me four years and God alone knows how much coffee. I can let you know when that one comes out if you sign up for my mailing list. (I don’t write fiction as part of an elaborate scam to collect email addresses, or I’d write like Dan Brown. Your email address is safe with me.)
You can contact me via my blog, This Writing Life, drop me an email, or tweet me @ian_hocking. I’d love to hear what you think of my work (typos/formatting screws-up also appreciated). I’m particularly keen to hear more from the lady who gave me a one-star review and suggested that I have the reading age of a ten-year-old. Because. Of. My. Short. Sentences. Oh, and to save you some effort: yes, of course I have a real time machine; no, you can’t use it, because that would create entertaining paradoxes, as anyone who’s watched Back to the Future will know.
Once more, thanks for reading.
The Story of Déjà Vu
Acknowledgements for the First Edition
The original manuscript was read by my intrepid friends Daniel Graaskov, Karen Jensen, Alex Mears, and Arie van der Lugt. Their comments vastly improved the final book. Further constructive feedback came via the Psychology Department Book Club at the University of Exeter (Rachael Carrick and Kate Fenwick were particularly helpful). Thanks also to Rachel Day for permission to use her copyrighted word ‘tit-full’. And not forgetting my editor at the UKA Press, the redoubtable Aliya Whiteley, who helped transform the manuscript from the bloated pug of yesterday to the svelte whippet of today (any errors of breeding, such as an extra ear or a penchant for chair legs, must be left at my door).
For specialist assistance, I must thank Paul Johns, who helped out with some of the medical conditions and procedures described in these pages. Where errors exist, I am the goat. With respect to the time machine, David Gardiner checked my calculations, rubbished them, and redid them from scratch.
My partner, Britta, has gone beyond the call of duty in giving me time and space to write this book since its inception, many moons ago, when the year 2003 was still in the future. I dedicate this book, and everything else, to her.
And In The End
An excerpt from my blog, dated 20th August, 2010. Read the original
What follows is a very personal post, for which I do not apologise. It is likely to be the last post I make to this blog (though perhaps not; see below). I hope that it will not be sentimental. That said, it will be honest. I will write about something that has been very important to me since I was a wee scamp.
A long time ago—when I was an undergraduate, fifteen years back—I read an interview with Stephen King in which he described the moment his novel, Carrie, was picked up by New England Library. He was living in a trailer and had so little money that the telephone was disconnected. The original news about the publication of Carrie came via telegram. King wanted to buy a gift for his wife. He went into town and found the only thing he could he imagine she wanted: a hair dryer.
Fifteen years ago, reading the interview with King, I already had two novels under my belt. They were awful. Since then, I’ve written four more. These last—Déjà Vu, Proper Job, Flashback and The Amber Rooms—are quite good. Déjà Vu has been published and the other three have been with my agent, John Jarrold, for some years. Four, I think. A long time.
Someone wrote—King again, I think—that a writer is a person who will write no matter what. In other words, if you lock them up in a cell without pen or pencil, they’ll write on the wall in their own blood. I didn’t believe that when I read it and I don’t believe it now. Even Stephen King comes to a point when the blood dries up. Writers are people. We—they—would want to play football if they were footballers, not sit on the subs bench; they would want to have a workshop, tools, and customers if they made furniture for a living; writers want to be read.